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Hot Chip's Joe Goddard has had one helluva year. He and his bandmates released their highly-anticipated LP One Life Stand in February and took a massive risk by going for a more streamlined, cohesive sound.The gamble payed off: the disc has received generally positive reviews and the group has spent the latter part of 2010 criss-crossing the globe, including a Sun/17 stop at the Warfield. Just a few months removed from a triumphant American headlining tour that was supported by critical darlings the XX, the Londoners are back opening up for their longtime friends LCD Soundsystem and playing some of the American biggest gigs of their career. Throw in the birth of his first child and a hectic DJ schedule, the Guardian was lucky to grab a quick word with the Hot Chip main man at his home in London.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Considering how high expectations for One Life Stand were, how are you feeling about it now that it's been out for a while?

Joe Goddard: It feels good. It was a stressful process, but it seems to have gone down quite well. Honestly, when I get done making an album, I always get a little bit tired of it and want to move on to the next one, so I really haven't listened to it much myself. That said, the shows have been going well, and people seem to really enjoy the new tracks in the live setting. I don't exactly know what people's opinions are, but I guess people have been enjoying it, which makes me happy [laughs].

I used to live in a town where the alternative-alternative (holler!) weekly had a comics page. Paging to the back of said volume each seven days I'd look for Tony Millionaire's joint, Maakies. Millionaire's rounding out a phalanx of guest speakers at this weekend's APE (Sat/16 and Sun/17), so I'm thinking back to the days when his preciously drawn little derelicts marked my Wednesdays.

A political mailer promoting progressive supervisorial candidate Jane Kim was funded primarily by former Mayor Willie Brown through a campaign committee that Kim consultant Enrique Pearce helped start and which was located in his office, the latest strange development in a race that is dividing the progressive movement at a crucial moment and prompting a nasty public debate over political “machines.”Read more »

By now, you’ve probably heard about the campaign gaffe in which an unidentified female associate of Jerry Brown (possibly Brown’s wife) called his opponent Meg Whitman a “whore” during a conversation that neither realized was being recorded over voice mail. Read more »

Earlier on sfbg.com, Virginia Miller turned WhiskyFest into Whisky Week, meeting with seven different distillers who'd come to attend the Fest from such far-flung booze berths as Kentucky and Scotland. Here's part one of her scotch-heavy Whisky Week highlights. Read on for part two: conversations with bourbon and rye distillers.Read more »

I saw my first movie when I was four or five: it was a revival of 101 Dalmations (1961), and I liked it enough to ask my mother if we could sit through it a second time (we did). I saw my second first movie when I was 19: it was a nine-minute short by Bruce Baillie titled Valentin de las Sierras (1967), and after seeing it I knew film history must be full of secrets. Read more »

Many traditional dancers are no longer content with merely preserving a valuable heritage; they want to put their own stamp on it. So now there's a new kind of dance, already conveniently labeled “ethno-contemporary.” Taiwanese-born, Indonesia-raised, and additionally US-trained Wan-Chao is at the forefront of this promising new genre. She dedicated Keep Her Safe, Please! Jakarta 1998 (Sat/16-Sun/17 at the Cowell Theater) to the victims of the anti-Chinese pogrom that included particularly vicious attacks against women.

Is Kathy Griffin as irritating as oil stains on a pelican's plumage or does she just play it as such on TV? After speaking with the comedian in anticipation of her live show this weekend at the Zellerbach Auditorium (Sat/17), this much is clear: Griffin is certainly committed to her character.

One would expect no less of a woman who has ridden a red-headed whorl of derision-abrasion from a Suddenly Susan sidekick gig to a six-season and counting reality TV show (My Life on the D-List) – not to mention sold out gigs at Madison Square Garden and a memoir entitled Official Book Club Selection that people appear to be liking. Sure, Stephen Baldwin and Dr. Phil have independently sought to strangle her, but they did so in front of her audience. She's like, the most popular unpopular girl ever, Rodney Dangerfield had he dropped the hangdog and set up a RSS feed straight to TMZ. Read on for our scuffle over philanthropy and sailor-style swearing.

Support your local sex workers! We are lucky to live in a city where those salacious somebodies that will take their kits off in the name of our pleasure and payment don't have to lay down and take it when the man gets all censorious and grabby – lucky to live in a city where St. James' Infirmary exists, that is. The Lusty Ladies agree, and on Sat/16 they're holding their annual Playday for St. J's – 16 hours of girl-on-girl-on-call for justice. Read more »

Today we look at last night's debate, at Meg v. Jerry, at Gavin v. Abel, at why such a sorry crew are running for Lt. Gov -- and why it's so hard for independent candidates to run for statewide office. Listen after the jump. Read more »

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised that termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell endorsed D10 candidate Lynette Sweet yesterday. Just disappointed. And it’s not just because Sweet refused to come into the Guardian this fall for an endorsement interview (a stance that suggests that Sweet would be depressingly inaccessible to reporters that haven’t drunk her Kool-Aid—a stance that, unfortunately, reminds me of Mayor Gavin Newsom's attitude towards the media). Read more »